Trio Vintage

Coach House, Dublin Castle

The baroque ensemble, Trio Vintage, played at the Coach House of Dublin Castle as part of a seven-venue Music Network tour. The programme was nicely constructed.

The great names of Bach and Handel brushed shoulders with lesser lights (Biber and Geminiani) as well as figures who have only recently begun to gain the attention of modern audiences and listeners (Nicola Matteis and Thomas Baltzar).

It was good to hear the most frequently performed of Handel’s violin sonatas, the Sonata in D, Op 1 No 13, presented as a worthy piece in its own right. It is usually heard as a warm-up item at the start of a virtuoso’s programme, but here it was placed last and was performed without the inappropriately syrupy finish that conventional virtuosos tend to bring to it.

It was good, too, to hear two sonatas by Biber, a figure whose emergence from the shadows has been an important achievement of the early-music movement over the last half-century or so. The more remarkable of the two sonatas offered by Trio Vintage was the Sonata Representativa, a work which slyly intercuts music that sets out fairly conventionally with representations that range from nightingale, cuckoo and quail to frog and cat and even a musketeer's march.

Trio Vintage delighted in the strange effects the players were called upon to deliver, and the works by the minor composers flowed nicely too. But for much of the evening there was a tendency towards imbalance.

When the bass line was in rapid motion, the forwardness of cellist Markus Möllenbeck tended to draw attention too much away from violinist Ariadne Daskalakis, whose expressive shaping often came across as far too mild.

Mildness was not the issue in harpsichordist Gerald Hambitzer’s solo contribution. In Bach’s Concerto in D, an arrangement of a concerto by Vivaldi, the see-saw nature of his rubato undermined an essential sense of forward momentum.

Möllenbeck’s handling of Geminiani’s D minor Cello Sonata showed some signs of technical frailty in delivery. But the musical approach was always decisive, the tone huskily distinctive, and the sense of full-on musical engagement was higher than in the bulk of the evening’s offerings.

Tour concludes tomorrow